


Wind in the Warp Drive

by cable69



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 13:25:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5667670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cable69/pseuds/cable69
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spock had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little apartment. First with a sonic cleaner, then with evap-pads; then on hydraulic lifts and stools and pressure risers, with a dust-drinker and a portable composter; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and streaks of grime all over his blue uniform, and an aching back and weary arms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wind in the Warp Drive

**Author's Note:**

> "Star Trek, Wind in the Willows style. This story is a little experiment I did in crossovers, to see how a text changes when its subjects are replaced, but the tone is kept the same. It is plagiarized from Chapter One of The Wind in the Willows, and the concept itself was shamelessly stolen from Ayalesca (who wrote an ST version of The Little Prince which is… beyond my ability to adequately describe), although I did it for reasons other than whimsy and boredom. But beyond my own interests, I write this only to please and amuse, not to profit. This is the product of admiration for both Star Trek (as a franchise) and Kenneth Grahame (as a sculptor of words and worlds).
> 
> If you haven’t read The Wind in the Willows—dear God, get yourself to a bookstore or library. It’s not necessary to have read the book before reading this, but again, dear God."
> 
> originally posted on ff.net; unedited & unfinished

Spock had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little apartment. First with a sonic cleaner, then with evap-pads; then on hydraulic lifts and stools and pressure risers, with a dust-drinker and a portable composter; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and streaks of grime all over his blue uniform, and an aching back and weary arms. Science was moving in the air outside and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little apartment with its spirit of secular discontent and longing. It was a small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his dust-drinker on the floor, said ‘Bath’pa!’ and ‘O Surak!’ and also ‘A photon torpedo on spring-cleaning,’ and bolted out of the apartment without even waiting to grab his communicator. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the thin, grimy stairs which answered in his case to the graveled driveway owned by people whose residences are nearer to their liking. So he stepped and stumbled and scrabbled and scintillated and then he stepped again and stumbled and scrabbled and scintillated, working quickly with his long legs and muttering to himself, ‘Down! Out, down and out we go!’ till at last, bang! his hands found the door and his nose came out into the sunlight, and he found himself running across the warm pavement of a great metropolis.

‘This is fascinating!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than cleaning!’ The sunshine struck hot on his black hair, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the apartment he had lived in so long the carol of honking hovers fell on his dulled pointed almost like a sehlat scream. Jumping off all his two legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he perused his way across the city until he reached the sea on the further side…

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along the coast, suddenly he stood at the edge of a roaring shipyard. Never in his life had he seen a shipyard before—this sleek, sinuous gathering of full-bodied spacecrafts, whirring and wooshing, flashing things with their solar panels and leaving them with a blink, to fling themselves into the air amongst their playmates, and to land and to be caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, roar and whistle, hubbub and riot. Spock was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the shipyard he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a patriarch who holds one spell-bound by tales of deepest philosophy; and when tired at last, he sat on a bench, while the shipyard still murmured to him, a rumbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the universe to be told at last to the insatiable mind.

As he sat on the bench and looked across the shipyard, a open door on a ship opposite, just beyond the smaller craft, caught his eye, and dreamily he fell into considering what an exciting life it would make for a Vulcan with few wants and fond of a stellar view out his window, above atmospheric level and remote from noise and dust. As he gazed, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; and it was too glittering and small for a console light. Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a wide face began gradually to grow up around it, like a frame round a picture.

A tanned round face, with bright teeth.

A competent round face, with the same twinkle in its eye that had first attracted his notice.

Small neat ears and thick blond hair.

It was Kirk!

Then the two men stood and regarded each other cautiously.

‘Hello, Spock!’ said Kirk.

‘Greetings, Kirk,’ said Spock.

‘Would you like to come over?’ enquired Kirk presently.

‘An amusing proposition,’ said Spock, rather pettishly, he being new to ships and ship life and its ways.

Kirk said nothing, but stooped and fetched a panel and toyed with it; then lightly stepped into a little hovercraft which Spock had not observed. It was painted silver outside and white within, and was just the size for two men; and Spock’s whole heart went out to it at once, even though he did not yet fully understand its uses.

Kirk floated smartly across and pulled the brakes. Then he held up his hand as Spock stepped gingerly down. ‘Lean on that!’ he said. ‘Come on, hurry up!’ and Spock to his surprise and rapture found himself actually standing inside the cockpit of a real hovercraft.

‘This has been a most intriguing day,’ said he, as Kirk activated the hover and took to the winds again. ‘I have never had the privilege of riding in a spacecraft.’

‘What?’ cried Kirk open-mouthed: ‘Never been in a — you never — well I — what have you been doing, then?’

‘Then spacecrafts are as nice as you posit?’ asked Spock shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leaned over in his stance and surveyed the panels, the lights, the emergency kit, the communicators, and all the fascinating mechanics, and felt the hovercar sway lightly under him.

‘Nice?’ said Kirk solemnly, as he leant forward into the wind. ‘Believe me, my dear friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in spaceships. Simply messing,’ he went on dreamily; ‘messing — about — in — spaceships; messing —‘

‘Look ahead, Kirk!’ cried Spock suddenly.

It was too late. The hovercar struck the spaceship full-speed. The dreamer, the joyous helmsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the hovercar, his boots in the air.

‘— about in spaceships — or with spaceships,’ Kirk went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. ‘In or out of ‘em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at a charted planet or whether you find a new one, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you can never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not. Listen up! If you’ve really nothing else to do today, suppose we drop down the shipyard together, and have a long day of it?’

Spock flexed his fingers from sheer happiness, spread his lips full with a sigh of contentment, and leaned back blissfully onto the blinking control panel. ‘What a day I am having!’ he said. ‘Let us start at once!’

‘Hold on just a sec, then,’ said Kirk. He activated the grav-drive and docked the hovercar, climbed up into the ship above, motioning Spock after him, and disappeared.

Spock went to the bridge and sat in a chair and stared around him and considered just bursting, the joy he felt was so absurd and high, and birds were fluttering around the port windows, and Galaxy-glass spaceships were taking off meters from their dock, and he let the thickest smile rest across his face.

After a short interval Kirk produced, staggering, a fat, colorful replicator.

‘Shove that under your feet,’ he observed to Spock, as tugged it into the bridge. Then he deactivated the grav-drive and took the controls of the Enterprise.

‘What is this?’ asked Spock, mind coiling with curiosity.

‘It makes tossed salads,’ replied Kirk briefly; ‘coldpepperscoldtomatoescoldstrawberriespickledth’klarbriebaguettecauliflowercucumbersandwichescroissantsbutterjellyfrenchfriesbeerlemonadeicedteateasofallkinds—’

‘Oh, stop,’ whispered Spock in ecstasies: ‘This is too much!’

‘Do you really think so?’ inquired Kirk seriously. ‘It’s only what I always take on little excursions, and Scotty is always telling me that I’m a mean captain and cut it very fine!’

Spock never heard a word he was saying. Absorbed in the new life he was entering upon, intoxicated with the eddy, the zephyr, the scents and the winds and the sunbeams, he trailed a hand in the passing air and dreamed long waking dreams. Kirk, like the good fellow he was, navigated steadily and did not disturb him.

‘I like your clothes awfully, Mr. Spock,’ he remarked after some half an hour had passed. ‘I’m going to get a blue syntho shirt and nice pressed black slacks myself some day.

‘Excuse me,’ said Spock, pulling himself together with an effort. ‘You must think me very rude; but this is all so new to me. So—this—is—a—spaceship!’

‘The Enterprise,’ corrected Kirk.

‘And you really live on a spaceship? What a fascinating life.’

‘On it and with it and by it and in it,’ said Kirk. ‘It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and hygiene. What it hasn’t got isn’t worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing. Oh! the times we’ve had together! Whether in the Alpha or Beta Quadrant, Gamma or Delta, it’s always got its fun and its excitements. When the Klingons are attacking during valor season, and my sickbay and corridors are teeming with injured, and the warriors run across the bridge itself; or again when it all drops away and we see whole galaxies that swirl like clouds, and the plasma and dilithium warps the drives, and we can potter about on impulse engines and make the most of the planets we find and civilizations we encounter, and things careless governments have abandoned on ground!’

‘But isn’t it a bit dull at times?’ Spock ventured to ask. ‘Just you and the Enterprise, and no one else to pass a word with?’

‘No one else to—well, I shouldn’t be hard on you,’ said Kirk with forebearance. ‘You’re new to the ship, and of course you don’t know. The ship is so crowded nowadays that many officers are leaving altogether: oh no, it isn’t what it used to be, at all. Ensigns, science officers, doctors, security personnel, engineers, all of them running around all the time and always wanting you to do something—as if a captain had no business of his own to attend to!’

‘What lies over there?’ asked Spock, waving a hand towards a blankish piece of chart that darkly framed the lit-up Vulcan constellations on one side of the Alpha Quadrant.

‘That? Oh, that’s just the Romulan Sector,’ said Kirk shortly. ‘We don’t go there very much, we Federation people.’

‘Are not they—are not they very nice people in there?’ said Spock, a trifle nervously.

‘We-ll,’ replied Kirk, ‘let me see. The Romulan citizens are alright. And the retired soldiers—some of them, but soldiers are a mixed lot. And then there’s Bones, of course. That human lives right in the heart of it; wouldn’t live anywhere else, either, if you paid him to do it. Dear old Bones! Nobody interferes with him. They’d better not,’ he added significantly.

‘Why, who should interfere with him?’ asked Spock.

‘Well, of course, there are—others,’ explained Kirk, in a hesitating sort of way. ‘Government officials—and commanders—and leaders—and so on. They’re all right in a way—I’m very good friends with them—pass the time of day when we meet, and all that—but they break out sometimes, there’s no denying it, because the treaty’s rather loose, and then—well, you can’t really trust them, and that’s a fact.’

Spock knew well that it is quite against human nature to dwell on awkward interplanetary relations, or even to allude to it; so he dropped the subject.

‘And beyond the Romulan Sector again?’ he asked: ‘Where the charts are all black and red, and one sees what may be systems or perhaps not, and something like warp signatures, or is it only solar flares?’

‘Beyond the Romulan Sector is the Galactic Barrier,’ said Kirk. ‘And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please. Now then! Here’s a new planet at last, where we’re going to beam down for lunch.’

Leaving warp, the ship now passed in front of what seemed at first sight like a little blue planet. Blue clouds sloped across the sky, great serpents gleamed below the surface of the glassy water, while ahead of them the golden reflection and warm beams of the planet’s sun, beam-in-beam with its child planet, filled the bridge with a soothing bank of heat, soft and cloying, yet with little clear motes of dust winking up cheerfully out of it at intervals. It was so beautiful that Spock could only cover his eyes and gasp, ‘O my! O my! O my!’

Kirk brought the ship alongside the planet, put her in orbit, helped the still awkward Spock safely to the transporter room, and pulled the replicator out of his pack. Spock begged as a favor to be allowed to activate it all by himself; and Kirk was very pleased to indulge him, and to sprawl at full length on the island they had found and rest, while his excited friend shook out a table-cloth and spread it, replicated a list of formulas one by one and arranged the new foods in due order, still gasping, ‘O my! O my!’ at each fresh revelation. When all was ready, Kirk said, ‘Now have a bite, dear friend!’ and Spock was indeed very glad to obey, for he had started his spring-cleaning at a very early hour that morning, as Vulcans will do, and had not paused for breakfast or lunch; and he had been across a very vast amount of space since that distant home planet, which now seemed so many lightyears ago.

‘What are you looking at?’ said Kirk presently, when the edge of their hunger was somewhat dulled, and Spock’s eyes were able to wander off the table-cloth a little.

‘I am looking,’ said Spock, ‘at a streak of bubbles I see travelling along the surface of the ocean. That is a very illogical thing.’

‘Bubbles? Oh my,’ said Kirk, and whistled cheerily in an inviting sort of tune.

A brown head of hair showed itself above the waves, and Scotty hauled himself out and toweled himself off.

‘Greedy beggars!’ he observed, going for the replicator. ‘Why didn’t you invite me, eh Kirk?’

‘This was an impromptu celebration,’ explained Kirk. ‘By the way—my friend Spock.’

‘Delighted, ah’m sure,’ said Scotty, and the two were friends forthwith.

‘Such a racket everywhere!’ continued Scotty. ‘All the ship seems to be out on th’ water today. Ah came up to this island to try an’ get a moment’s peace, an’ then stumble upon you fellows! At least—ah beg pardon—ah don’t exactly mean that, y’know.’

There was a crunch of sand behind them, proceeding from a dune crusty with last year’s highest tide, and a bushy head, with square shoulders behind it, glared forth on them.

‘Come on out, Bones!’ shouted Kirk.

Bones trotted forward a pace or two; then grunted, ‘Humph! Company,’ and turned his back and disappeared from view.’

‘That’s just like Bones!’ observed the disappointed Kirk. ‘Simply hates other living creatures. Now we won’t see any more of him today. Well, tell us, who’s out on the ocean?’

‘Chekov and Sulu’re out, for two,’ replied Scotty. ‘In their brand-new hovercar; new paintjob, new everythin’!’

The two officers looked at each other and laughed. 

‘Once, it was nothing but video games,’ said Kirk, ‘then they got bored and took to chess. Nothing would please them more but to play and play all day and every day, and a nice mess they made out of my leisure room. Last month it was karate, and we all had to go and see their performances, and pretend they were any good. They were going to spend the rest of their lives training. It’s all the same, whatever they take up; they get tired of it, and start on something fresh.’

‘Two good fellows, too,’ remarked Scotty reflectively: ‘But no stability—especially in a hovercar!’

From where they sat they could get a glimpse of the main current in the great sea; and just then a hovercar flashed into view, the pilot—a tallish, fit man with black hair—wavering badly and rolling a good deal, but working his hardest. Kirk stood up and hailed him, but the navigator—for there were two of them—shook his head and settled sternly to his charts.

‘They’ll be out of the car in a minute if they roll like that,’ said Kirk, sitting down again.

‘Of course they will,’ chuckled Scotty. ‘Did ah ever tell you that good story about Sulu, Chekov, and Pike? It happened this way. Sulu…’


End file.
